Welcome to Kindergarten!

Now that it is our eleventh day of kindergarten, we are settling into a great routine and are already hard at work doing lots of learning! I am sure you have heard some of the highlights of our first few weeks of school, including:

• our hunt for the missing gingerbread cookies!
• hatching and releasing two monarch butterflies
• watching a puppet show from Mrs. Lasher about the Gingerbread Man
• filling each others' buckets
• learning how to play the "Counting Game"
  
• earning stars
• learning routines and procedures for MANY different things
  

and much, much more. We are spending time practicing, practicing, and practicing some more the routines of our day and discussing and learning about school rules and expectations. I am proud to say that this is a group of children who clearly care about each other, their school, and their teacher and they are working and playing very nicely together! I have been handing out many stars each day when I "catch" a student being respectful, responsible, and/or safe. Ask your child what he or she did to earn a star this week!

I plan to use this blog as a way to communicate some of the activities that we complete in the classroom. I will also post my newsletter here for those of you who prefer electronic copies of information. Feel free to share the link with family members and friends who may be interested in seeing what your child is up to in kindergarten! Please let me know if you have any questions or ideas about this blog.

I will end this post with a picture of one of our favorite things that happened this week in Room Eight: Mr. O'Hara, our assistant principal, visited to read us some of his favorite children's books. He read Where the Wild Things Are (his daughter's favorite) and The Monster At the End of This Book (his favorite when he was a child). The children enjoyed having a guest reader and Mr. O. was thrilled to have a chance to visit our classroom. We look forward to having him visit again!